Friday, December 28, 2012

#NotACliff #PoliMeme of the Day is True. It's Plain Old #PummelThePoor

The ‘fiscal cliff’ explained in charts (Washington Post).

It's #NotACliff. It's an anvil thrown off the cliff onto the heads of the poor.
Grateful for cleaned up graphics by Jon Peltier.

This is the opposite of #EndPoverty and the inverse of the #AbundanceAlgorithm.

#QE5: Quantitative easing for the people

REUTERS:
 Instead of giving newly created money to bond traders, central banks could distribute it directly to the public. Technically such cash handouts could be described as tax rebates or citizens’ dividends, and they would contribute to government deficits in national accounting. But these accounting deficits would not increase national debt burdens, since they would be financed by issuing new money, at zero cost to government or to future generations, instead of selling interest-bearing government bonds.
Giving away free money may sound too good to be true or wildly irresponsible, but it is exactly what the Fed and the BoE have been doing for bond traders and bankers since 2009. Directing QE to the general public would not only be much fairer but also more effective.
Exactly. It's 200 years past time to implement the #AbundanceAlgorithm

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

#GreatCompromise is to avoid #FiscalCliff by leaping into #EconomicAbyss

Mercifully, at least there's no more pain when you cease to exist altogether after years of fighting the inevitable decrepitude, right? NYTimes:
The truth is that both the president and House Republicans have agreed to shrink a critical part of the government to its smallest in at least half a century. This is regardless of which trillion-dollar proposal gains the upper hand. Without such spending, the government becomes little more than a heavily armed pension plan with a health insurer on the side. To put it in perspective, this would cut the government’s civilian discretionary budget to the smallest it has been as a share of the economy at least since the Eisenhower administration — when a quarter of the population lived under the poverty line, thousands of children still contracted polio each year and fewer than one in 12 Americans older than 25 had a college degree. According to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, even going over the so-called fiscal cliff would not cut it as deeply. We’ve had this debate several times before. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was based on the proposition that government should play a much bigger role to guarantee Americans’ economic security. In the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson asserted the government’s responsibility to alleviate the plight of the poor and disenfranchised. Three decades ago, President Ronald Reagan changed course, ushering in an era of government retrenchment that persisted pretty much unabated until we were walloped by the Great Recession.

Monday, December 17, 2012

Industrial Capitalism's #GreatDecoupling. #Jaws2013. No Signs of Closing. Ever.

For followers of this space, this is the best Christmas gift possible. Must reading at NYT by @erikbryn. Sadly, human on the whole haven't even reacted to climate change in any meaningful way; so we're not particularly any more enthusiastic about how the humans will respond to these facts, as to any others.
first drawn by the economist Jared Bernstein, productivity growth and employment growth started to become decoupled from each other. Bernstein calls the gap that’s opened up “the jaws of the snake.” They show no signs of closing.

As the jaws of the snake opened, wages suffered even more than job growth. Adjusted for inflation, the average U.S. household now has lower income than it did in 1997. Wages as a share of G.D.P. are now at an all-time low, even as corporate profits are at an all-time high. The implicit bargain that gave workers a steady share of the productivity gains has unraveled.

Digital labor, in short, substitutes for human labor. This happens first with more routine tasks, which is a big part of the reason why less-educated workers have seen their wages fall the most as we moved deeper into the computer age.

As we move ahead the Great Decoupling will only accelerate.

Digital progress lowers prices, improves quality, and brings us into a world where abundance becomes the norm.

But there is no economic law that says digital progress will benefit everyone evenly. As technology races ahead it can leave a lot of workers behind. In the short run we can improve their prospects greatly by investing in infrastructure, reforming education at all levels and encouraging entrepreneurs to invent the new products, services and industries that will create jobs.

While we’re doing this, however, we also need to start preparing for a technology-fueled economy that’s ever-more productive, but that just might not need a great deal of human labor. Designing a healthy society to go along with such an economy will be the great challenge, and the great opportunity, of the next generation.
While there is "no economic law that says digital progress will benefit everyone evenly," we live in an era that we are participating in the very process of biological evolution; amending natural laws and processes that humans had absolutely no hand in engineering. In contrast to the relatively immutable laws of physics, economics are completely man-made; these are not immutable laws by any stretch. We can and must re-make economics in the image of service to humanity; before the machines fully incorporate a contrary belief system. It's worth repeating tried and true reason statement of these principles and aims:
"Human progress is our Cause,
Liberty of thought our Supreme Wish,
Freedom of Conscience our Mission, and
The guarantee of Equal Rights To All People Everywhere,
Our Ultimate Goal."

Friday, December 7, 2012

Public Money is NOT Debt. It is Equity in the Commonwealth. All of us.

Michael Kumhof: The Chicago Plan Revisited - The Advantages of 100% Money (Quotation at 12:24)

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

People are not any company's greatest asset

Today, Citigroup announced that it is cutting 11,000 jobs worldwide, about 4 percent of its staff, to save as much as $1.1 billion a year in expenses.
People our not any company's greatest Asset. This is one of the most pernicious lies perpetuated by an inherently sociopathological system. Sociopathological in that it acts like Doris Day to the world, while psychologically battering her children behind closed doors. Sociopathological in that it speaks in terms of relationship, mutual concern, support, aid, teamwork, all the while acting exclusively in terms of control. Stark, infinitely self-absorbed, merciless, my-way-or-the-highway control. Econ101 teaches us that Assets are the opposite Liabilities. When times get tough, we cling to Assets, and cut Liabilities. Yet, employees and workers continue to swallow this "you are our greatest asset" bait, hook, line, and sinker, every day.

We don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure this out. Every detective show in history teaches us the same lesson: "People say lots of things, I'm looking at behavior." Without any elaborate philosophizing or story telling, all we have to do is look at how the past 100 years of industrial capitalism has behaved. We have the outcomes, right in front of us. Overwhelming, empirical, even if seemingly inconceivable truths. The homeless children, the displaced, discarded, and demoralized adults doped up on anti-depressants to dampen the desperation that any normal, healthy human being experiences when the red carpet that was rolled out for them is yanked up with glee, sending lives tumbling, while the perpetrators of this sick, sick game ROTFL.

The Mayan calendar does not predict or promise that the Earth itself will cease to exist as of Dec 21, 2012. It does, however, turn out out to make very timely recommendation for the #EndOfTheWorld as we know it and a reboot to a new and virus-free #EarthOS.

Not only are we allowed to speak of alternatives, we must implement them, now. We know how the abundance algorithm works. It's time. Because human beings can be the Earth's greatest asset.

Monday, November 26, 2012

Calories, Joules, Watts vs. Dollar, Euro, Yen

"We have to begin regarding Calories, Joules and Watts as the key currencies rather than the Dollar, Euro and Yen."

We Are Here

"At present, economics is the study of how people transform nature to meet their needs and it treats the exploitation of finite natural resources including energy, water, air, forests, arable land and oceans as externalities, which they are not.  For example, we cannot pollute and damage natural ecosystems and their local communities ad infinitum without severe repercussions to their underlying sustainability."

"The current model of the disposable economy operates as a system for transforming low-entropy raw materials and energy into high-entropy toxic waste and unavailable energy, while providing society with interim goods and services and the temporary satisfaction that most deliver.  Any such transformations in the economy mean that there will be less low-entropy materials and energy available for natural ecosystems. Mounting evidence of this conflict demonstrates the limits to our national, regional and global growth!"


Sunday, September 16, 2012

50% U.S. Unemployment? Not in 20 years. Right Now.

Note: You say we exaggerated? Your 2014 BLS Update is below.

#IncomprehensibleTruth is still truth. This is only the very beginning of the kinds of breathtaking wake up calls and cataclysmic shifts we'll discover amidst accelerating #BigData in the coming decade.

The first tenant of economics is, "compared to what?" What do we mean by #Unemployment? How many ways has that word been laundered, spun, and compared to false and misleading metrics, to date? This chart begins to pull back the curtain; but you should get the data for yourself and press #OpenData into service of both illuminating our current predicament and forging new ways forward.

Fig 1. -- Total U.S. Labor Non-Participant Rate.
Fig 1. -- Total U.S. Labor Non-Participant Rate.

LEGEND
totnonpart (top purple line) =  Total U.S. Labor Non-Participant Rate. Number of Americans displaced, discarded, disabled, dropped out of the count and completely off the Workforce Map.
civnonpart (orange/yellow line) = Civilian Labor Force Non-Participation Rate (100-civpart).
u6rate (green line) = True Total #Unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers plus total employed part time for economic reasons.
unrate (bottom blue line) = MSM Consensus Crowd-Control #Unemployment Story

Source: Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED mobile)

Don't like that slice on The Data? Try the direct BLS view on for size:

2014 BLS Update



Still don't like The Data? Think it's out of context? Try this compared to what view, vs. GDP & Profits:


What will really bake your post-scarcity noodle is that right now, in 2013, we've created the first 3D printed food, straight from the Star Trek replicator. Got change for a paradigm?

Sunday, March 4, 2012

Wall Street Psycho Inmates Still Running the Asylum

Oh, you thought the worst was over? They're already trying to bury the bodies again. "Now, citing competitive concerns, bankers are pressing the Fed to limit its release of information—expected as early as next week—to what was published after the first test of big banks in 2009" (Lenders Stress Over Test Results, WSJ). So much for sunlight, transparency, and truth.

Saturday, January 28, 2012

"Capitalism has shortfalls," says Richest Man in the World, Bill Gates.

“Capitalism has worked phenomenally. Look at North Korea versus South Korea, or China before and after 1979. Capitalism has shortfalls. It doesn’t ... take care of the poor, and it underfunds innovation, so we have to offset that. We don’t have to [ask] whether capitalism is wrong.” - Bill Gates: 'I wrote Steve Jobs a letter as he was dying. He kept it by his bed’ - Telegraph

This is precisely the premise of our work in these pages. It's not about whether an abstract system is right or wrong, but whether or not it's accomplishing all of our human objectives. Industrial capitalism worked for the stage of civilization that the so-called advanced west traversed over the past 150 years; it's simply not adequate for the next leg of the journey. We can and should immediately offset poverty and homelessness with Basic Income and continue to evolve toward maximum human flourishing.

Monday, January 16, 2012

Core issue that killed #MLK was #EconomicInequality #ItsNotAboutRace It's about #BasicIncome Sustainable #Postscarcity #EndPoverty

It's so not about race. The core issue that killed #MLK was moving beyond superficial distinctions of color and creed, taking on the core malignancy of the human condition: escalating and unsustainable economic inequality. 

King's evolving political advocacy in his later years ... paralleled the teachings of the progressive Highlander Research and Education Center, with whom King was affiliated. King began to speak of the need for fundamental changes in the political and economic life of the nation. Towards the time of his murder, King more frequently expressed his opposition to the war and his desire to see a redistribution of resources to correct racial and economic injustice. Though his public language was guarded, so as to avoid being linked to communism by his political enemies, in private he sometimes spoke of his support for democratic socialism. In one speech, he stated that "something is wrong with capitalism" and claimed, "There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism."

Of course, the word distribution has long since become an emotionally hijacked firestarter keyword of the fundamentalist tinfoil hat lexicon; and actually, it's perhaps not the most accurate word to describe the challenges of a sustainable postscarcity circulatory system. Notwithstanding, a preponderance of economic scholarship over the most recent half dozen decades or so has gradually converged on the most logical first step, variously described as Basic Income, Universal Basic Income (UBI), Basic Income Guarantee (BIG), and similar language-specific nomenclature that crosses virtually all ephemeral cultural and language boundaries.

Follow, learn, and join the rapidly rising global #BasicIncome trend on twitter:
And if all that is still not enough to bring you up to warp speed, here's Captain Picard: Make it So.

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

5 Utter Fictions of Money and 10 Solutions

When the tinfoil hat brigade says that our economy is a Ponzi pyramid, they're essentially right. After U.S. President Lincoln was assassinated (perhaps in part because he printed the Greenback; the people's currency), the banksters hijacked the system. "So it was a large fraud that was backstopped by a sort of over-fraud." - Ellen Brown. Cue the 20:25 mark to get the 30 seconds prior that provides context for that quotation. Where thinking people of conscience can legitimately differ is considering the matter of which form of social capitalism, or free market socialism, which mashup of an adaptive mixed economy to implement in order to address the resulting unsustainable resource skews, to provide sustainable currency circulation -- not distribution -- via a Basic Income, or similar program that ensures consistent, healthy, transpiration at the capillary level of the economic body.


Regardless of what you might have been told by an abusive parent or others, you're smart. Probably very smart, or you likely wouldn't be reading these words. So, instead of spoon feeding you yet another forgettable Top 10, the subject of this post is your assignment: watch the full video. Do the homework. Write your list of the the top 5 Utter Fictions of Money and 10 Solutions that you discover in the comments here. We can do this. We can increment the system, raise it to a more sustainable, adaptive level without throwing out the baby with the bath water. That's the '++' of Capitalism++.